Corporate greed

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

---

This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Learn more ▼

Issues may include:

• This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
• This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
• More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
• The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
• The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How you can help:

• Add documented examples with verifiable sources
• Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
• Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
• Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
• Flesh out the article with relevant information

This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, please visit the Moderator's noticeboard, or the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.

Corporate greed, or simply greed, is a modern phenomenon in which corporations pursue goals for profit and shareholder-value without valuing customer thoughts and consumer rights.

Why it is a problem

When companies increase prices & cut corners with no regards to their customers, they'll be positively impacted short-term, but long term they'll be negatively impacted with decreased trust & sales.

Not just that, but there are people who depend on certain software, which may be too expensive for them to afford, and it may be difficult for them to make a switch, this is only something that harms both sides.

Consumer over-reliance on products and a corporation's domination over other businesses may create what's known as a Monopoly, which is potentially illegal if the company also partakes in anti-competitive practices that harm consumers & restrict competition, as defined by antitrust laws.

Common Tactics Used to Increase Profits:

1. A company simply increasing the prices on products & Subscription service's alike for no apparent reason. (Also known as "Price Gouging")
2. Implementing a Subscription service into a product that has already been bought In order to revoke ownership from It's users.
3. Using targeted/personalized ads in order to gain more data on someone, only to sell that data to more advertisers & third-party websites.
4. Purposefully decreasing the quality of some products to save money and/or to encourage consumers to buy newer & more powerful items to replace the older ones. (Also known as "Planned obsolescence")
5. Decreasing the average wages of some or all types of employees.
6. Retroactively restricting access to features on items that you've already bought/paid for to push you into giving more money to use previously freely accessible features (more commonly known as a "Paywall" or "Digital lock").
7. Decreasing the sizes of products while keeping the prices the same(Also known as "Shrinkflation", and It's more common in supermarkets & retail stores).
8. Implementation of False advertising or Bait-and-switch tactics in a company's commercials to bring in more customers.

Common Responses & Action Against Unfair/Greedy Corporations:

1. Boycotts & Seeking Alternatives:

As a result of collective disapproval of a companies ethics, people search for alternatives and urge others to do so as well. If done so correctly & on a large scale, this can be one of the easiest ways to push companies back into the right direction, either by rolling back an update or providing a new service to consumers in order to solve an apparent problem.^{[citation needed (09 Feb 2026)]}

2. Piracy/Torrenting:

Plenty of people have responded to mistreatment & company backlash by pirating software in order to have a better experience/to save money and avoid giving more to corporations that has wrecked their original sense of trust.^{[citation needed (09 Feb 2026)]} As more and more people pirate products, the more convenient It becomes due to seeding(short for allowing others to leach off you) or people providing said software to others themselves via "cracking", and as it becomes more convenient, ^{[citation needed (09 Feb 2026)]}

3. Educating Others & Spreading Awareness:

Victims & others that disapprove of excessive levels of greed committed by a certain corporation usually share information to others that are close to them(either by showing proof of it using sources or explaining something that happened to them & others).

By doing this, the news can spread even if it isn't mainstream yet or the information is extremely hard to access intentionally, thus potentially leading to boycotts or Class Actions & Lawsuits If there is enough pressure.^{[citation needed (09 Feb 2026)]}

See also

• Buy now, pay later
• Financial censorship